amiga

Cult of Linux, and cheap cheap hardware

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Potpourri. I just have two little things to write about today, so that’s what I’ll do.
The Cult of Linux, and cults of computing past. In yesterday’s comments, Dave Thorarinsson brought up an interesting phenomenon. He observed, when talking about his new Linux box and losing track of time learning it, “It pretty much feels like the time I had my Amiga.”

I remember reading in the mail section of Amiga magazines, more than a decade ago, “I haven’t had this much fun since I got my C-64!” And the old Commodore magazines noted that their C-64s had a special place in their devotees’ hearts and asked, “Have you ever heard of anyone getting attached to a PC clone?”

The inferred answer is no. And that doesn’t seem to have changed. Today, the biggest PC enthusiasts replace their machines frequently, relegating their old, unbeloved machines to grunt roles, or scrapping them for parts.

The C-64, by contrast, was a simple machine. Although it only had one slot for expansion, the motherboard itself was simple enough that just about anyone with a little bit of patience could trace it out and understand it. There was some unused address space in it that you could add chips to. Common projects included speech synthesizers and an extra sound chip, so you could have six-voice, stereo sound. And it seemed like most C-64 owners had tried their hand writing at least simple programs.

The Amiga was similar. It was harder to program, and a little harder to hack, but I had a subdirectory on my Amiga’s hard drive that was called “PD Hardware,” containing makeshift schematics for stuff I could build. I wired in a PAL/NTSC switch so I could change video standards and run European software correctly. I even designed an add-on board for it myself, once, to give myself an extra ROM socket. And of course I replaced much of the operating system with replacement utilities written by hobbyists that were smaller and faster, had more features, or both.

You want to know why the Amiga and C-64 fanatics were so loyal? They knew their machines inside and out, and to a degree that just wasn’t possible with a PC clone.

With Linux, the hardware doesn’t matter anymore, but you can customize the software to whatever extent you want. The hardest-core Linux people are doing just that. At a level below that, people compile the OS from source, from scratch. At a level below that, they just replace utilities with smaller and faster or more functional ones, like I was doing with my Amiga.

The long and the short of it is tweakers have a lot more liberties with Linux than they’ll ever get out of Redmond.

People who liked my book can certainly find a lot to like with Linux. People who fancy themselves experts but don’t really want to know how their computers work and who think books like mine are a waste of time will never be tied to Linux like the fanatics are.

Cheap hardware. It’s a buyer’s market. I’m building an intranet server for my church, and they have lots of bits and pieces but not quite enough for a complete system, so I did some looking around at my favorite bottom-fishing holes. You can get an awful lot of computer for next to nothing these days.

I’ve bought things at least once from each of these vendors, and they got stuff to me reasonably fast (within a week, ground shipping) so I feel reasonably comfortable recommending them.

Slot-1 barebones systems — case, power supply, slot 1 mobo (66 MHz FSB, so you’re stuck with P2s up to 333 MHz or Celerons, and according to the manufacturer, Celerons will work), and a floppy drive. $24.50. $19.95 if you don’t mind some wear. Very nice.

At the same place, scroll down and you can pick up Tier-1 business-class P2s for under $200. If you’re lucky you can sometimes even find a dual-capable machine. They go fast, but the getting’s good. Lots of businesses are dumping these due to their 3- or 4-year upgrade cycles. For someone who just wants to do word processing and e-mail, these systems are overkill. If you want to upgrade in pieces over the course of the next couple of years, the P2s with a 100 MHz FSB are workhorses and you can add lots of cheap memory, nice video cards, and fast, cheap hard drives. Gatermann just picked up an HP Vectra P2-266, dual capable, with SCSI, for $117. It will serve him well. He plans to run Debian on it, but I don’t know if he’s thinking of it as a server or a workstation. It’d make a fabulous server.

72-pin SIMMs — if you’ve still got a system that takes them, nice deals on 4-16MB sticks, and good deals on bigger sticks.

Low-end Pentium I desktops — P75-120, 16 meg of RAM, 1 MB video, who knows what else. $29.99. Nice for a low-end Linux box, or for a Win95 system that’s going to see limited use. Put a fast hard drive in it and it’ll surprise you. After you get yours, check and see what CPUs the system will take; a P200 can be had for as little as $16 and makes a nice upgrade. It’s a pretty big step up from 75 MHz to 200 MHz.

Seagate 9-gig 5.25″ full-height SCSI HD — $12.95. If you’ve got two 5.25″ bays open and no spacer between them, here’s a cheap way to fill it with 9 gigs of storage. I know a couple of people who have these drives. They’re surprisingly quick (they hold their own next to 7200-rpm 3.5″ disks). Back up your data and buy some spares if the shipping doesn’t kill you. One of the guys I know has several of these, and he’s had one or two die on him.

FIC AZ-11 ATX mobo — $34.95. It’ll take Durons and Athlon Thunderbirds. The fastest chip I’ve put in one is a 1 GHz Duron. No ISA slots and just 5 PCI slots, but it’s a capable board. I use one in my video editing workstation, and I paid more than 35 bucks for it. Totally obsolete, but when you can get a 1 GHz Duron and fan on this board for $89, who cares? It’ll still be a good computer in three years. Trust me.

I keep seeing this board on the closeout places, so I expect even after the current supply dries up, there’ll be more.

Speaking of closeout motherboards, there’s a variety of them over at Just Deals. You can get a Soyo Socket 370 board for $28 and various Socket A boards in the $35-$40 range. If it’s Slot 1 or even Slot A you’re looking for (maybe you’ve got a CPU laying around), you can find stuff there too.

And if you need a cheap copy of Word 97, you can get the Works 99 suite for 30 bucks.

Need an operating system for that new old computer? Prices range from $25 for Win95 to $180 for WinXP Pro.

Why Linux stands a chance

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , ,

Something I read on LinuxToday on Monday made me realize something. The article was a tutorial on writing Gnome apps with Python. Not too exciting, right? Not until you realize the implications. Python is a high-level, interpreted language. Gnome produces good, professional-looking applications with Windows-like functionality like toolbars and menus and drag-and-drop.
Put two and two together. Remember the early days of computing, when practically everyone who owned one knew how to program, at least a little bit? We’d program our 8-bit microcomputers in Basic, and sometimes we’d come up with something cool. You might send your creation off to a magazine in hopes of them publishing it and sending you a little money — a friend growing up and I netted a cool $350 on a little hack we wrote over spring break one year. Other times you just uploaded your creation to a BBS, hoping that people would find it useful, and maybe someone would download it and improve it a little. IBM was big and unstoppable, and Apple made the wise decision to flood the schools with cheap hardware in hopes of making it up by selling overpriced hardware to homes and businesses (which they did), but the homebrew market kept Commodore afloat for 10 years after their last good marketing decision. The cost of entry was low, and an easy-to-learn programming language was built right in, so creative minds could start playing with it without spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on development tools and thousands of dollars going to class.

The results weren’t always professional, but a surprising amount of it was exceptionally high-quality. High enough to sell more machines. Today, some 20 years after the Commodore 64 was released, it still has a following. It’s insane.

I still think that was part of what killed the Amiga. There were free languages for it, but you had to fork over a few hundred bucks for the toolkit to make them work. A lot of people did, but not enough. The development community was small. Some of the best stuff I saw on that platform came from people who pirated the toolkit. But not enough people did, so the pool of people to learn and steal tricks from was tiny. Meanwhile, Microsoft was selling complete languages, with everything you needed, for less than Commodore was charging for its header files. The Amiga never stood a chance.

Linux and other open-source projects collectively give you a free operating system or five, but they also give hundreds of development tools. The end result is Web sites like Freshmeat that do nothing but track new software. There may be more graphical Linux freeware out there now than there is Windows freeware. Considering Linux has maybe 1/50 the installed base of Windows, that’s pretty impressive. Linux doesn’t have a killer app just yet, but it may come. It’s definitely not short of ideas. Just this past week, someone released a hack for the Nautilus file manager to make it read binary newsgroups. It reads them and is intelligent enough to group related binaries in subdirectories for you. It’s a file collector’s delight. Brilliant idea. I’ve never seen anything like that for any other OS, especially not Windows.

Free languages lower the bar. Free and capable high-level languages lower the bar even more. Even a non-programmer like me can have an idea, hack out something in Python, and even if it doesn’t work perfectly, it can serve as a springboard for someone else to grab and improve, either by revising the existing code or by translating it into a lower-level, faster language. The quality of the code isn’t nearly as important as the quality of the idea. And we all know programmers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas.

Maybe Linux will remain an underground, punk OS forever. But even if it does, it’s going to be an unbelievably good one. Look for it to be bigger than the Mac within two years.

Happy New Year!

Dave Farquhar General , , , , , , , , ,

The way the ‘Net oughta be. I finally broke down and bought a VCR yesterday. It’s hard to do video work without one, and you want to give people drafts on VHS. When it comes to consumer video, there are two companies I trust: Hitachi and Hitachi. So I went looking for a Hitachi VCR. Their low-end model, a no-frills stereo 4-head model, ran $70 at Circuit City. I ordered it online, along with 5 tapes. Total cost: 80 bucks. For “delivery,” you’ve got two options: delivery, or local pickup. I did local pickup at the store five miles from where I live. You avoid the extended warranty pitch and trying to convince someone in the store to help you, and you just walk into the store, hand the paperwork to customer service, sign for it, then go pick it up. Suddenly consumer electronics shopping is like Chinese or pizza take-out. I love it.
The VCR’s not much to look at and the $149 models are more rugged-looking and have more metal in them, but this model is made in Korea so it ought to be OK, and the playback’s great on my 17-year-old Commodore 1702 (relabeled JVC) composite monitor. For what I’ll be asking it to do, it’s fine. In my stash of Amiga cables I found an RCA y-adapter that mixes two audio outputs, which I used to connect to the monitor’s mono input.

Desktop Linux. Here are my current recommendations for people trying to replace Windows with Linux.

Web browser: Galeon. Very lightweight. Fabulous tabbed interface. I hate browsing in Windows now.
Minimalist browser: Dillo. Well under a meg in size, and if it’ll render a site, it’ll render it faster than anything else you’ll find.
FTP client: GFTP. Graphical FTP client, saves hosts and username/password combinations for you.
PDF viewer: XPDF. Smaller and faster than Acrobat Reader, though that’s available for Linux too.
Mail client/PIM: Evolution. What Outlook should have been.
Lightweight mail client: Sylpheed. Super-fast and small, reasonably featured.
File manager: Nautilus. Gorgeous and easy to use, though slow on old PCs. Since I use the command line 90% of the time, it’s fine.
Graphics viewer: GTK-See. A convincing clone of ACDSee. Easy-to-use graphics viewer with a great interface.
News reader: Pan. Automatically threads subject headers for you, and it’ll automatically decode and display uuencoded picture attachments as part of the body. Invaluable for browsing the graphics newsgroups.
File compression/decompression: I use the command-line tools. If you want something like WinZip, there’s a program out there called LnxZip. It’s available in RPM or source form; I couldn’t find a Debian package for it.
Desktop publishing: Yes, desktop publishing on Linux! Scribus isn’t as powerful as QuarkXPress, but it gives a powerful enough subset of what QuarkXPress 3.x offered that I think I would be able to duplicate everything I did in my magazine design class way back when, in 1996. It’s more than powerful enough already to serve a small business’ DTP needs. Keep a close eye on this one. I’ll be using it to meet my professional DTP needs at work, because I’m already convinced I can do more with it than with Microsoft Publisher, and more quickly.
Window manager: IceWM. Fast, lightweight, integrates nicely with GNOME, Windows-like interface.
Office suite: Tough call. KOffice is absolutely good enough for casual use. StarOffice 6/OpenOffice looks to be good enough for professional use when released next year. WordPerfect Office 2000 is more than adequate for professional use if you’re looking for a commercial package.

Wrapping up a week…

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Someone at Google has a sense of humor. See (or should I say 533?) for yourself.
Dan Bowman sent me the link. My response?

+#4+ !$ $0 k3wl! +#4nk$!

Desktop video. I still can’t get my Pinnacle DV500’s composite inputs to work right. The rest of the card seems to function just fine. As a workaround, I tried connecting a DVD-ROM drive and ripping the source video digitally, straight off the DVD. I was able to get decoded .VOB files to the drive, but the utilities to convert them into usable AVI files (Premiere won’t work with VOBs) all had an annoying tendency to crash. At one point I suspected I had a binary compiled for Intel systems, and obviously my AMD CPU won’t like those SSE instructions. So I copied a single 1-gig VOB file over to a P3-based laptop. The utility got a little further, but it still crashed.

And yes, incidentally, I did secure permission from the copyright holders to use their video. As for the legality of what I did in the DMCA era, one of the utilities looked at the DVD and said it was unprotected. It’d be hard to prosecute me for circumventing copy protection when none existed in the first place.

I was going to say we’ve come a long way since Amigas and Video Toasters, but I’m not going to say that. Amigas and Video Toasters actually worked.

Tribute. How’d I forget this? The Silent Beatle died Thursday. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you already knew that.

The radio station I listen to most often, which can’t decide whether it wants to be a retro station, a New Wave station, a hair band station, or an Adult Alternative station, stepped way outside its format and did a nice Beatles tribute Friday at lunch, playing an hour’s worth of tunes, ending with “The Long and Winding Road,” which seemed eerily appropriate.

I remember when the Beatles boxed set came out a few years ago. I was still in college, and my next-door neighbor, Chip, got it the first day. He and I watched the corresponding TV special, and I remember someone walking in and saying he didn’t know any Beatles songs. I told him he was crazy. The Beatles are so pervasive, I said, that they’re not even just part of our culture anymore. They’re part of our DNA.

So Chip reached over and turned on his CD player and flipped through a few selections. A look of recognition came over his face to most of them. Yeah, he knew some Beatles songs. He’d just never recognized them as Beatles songs. Even young whippersnappers like us knew them and loved them.

The Beatles were history years before I was born, and for that matter, by the time I was born in 1974, even their record label, Apple Records, was in shambles. I have no recollection of the day John Lennon was murdered. The earliest Beatles memory I had growing up was hearing George Harrison’s “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” on the radio and seeing the video on TV, in 1986. It was a good tune. Not as good as the best stuff he wrote, and it’s largely forgotten today, but what other songs from 1986 do people remember today? Bon Jovi? Puh-lease. It was such a bad year for music that The Police were able to remake their 1981 hit, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” and score a minor hit with it. Compared to the other choices we had that year, George Harrison scratching his nails down a blackboard for three minutes would have been cooler, just because it was George Harrison.

And he and the rest of his bandmates knew that. That was cool, because it freed them to experiment. So they had that stack of bubblegum pop hits in the early 60s that everyone remembers today, but in addition to that, they had their psychedelic period and by 1968 they had dabbled in everything else imaginable. Heavy metal? They did some of that. Industrial rock? They even did some of that. When it came to rock’n’roll, The Beatles tried everything. Everything that’s happened since has just been further exploration of territory they already covered.

George Harrison’s last few years weren’t pleasant ones, due to his battles with cancer and with deranged fans. I hope he’s happier now. I can’t imagine him doing anything else but sitting somewhere, making music with John Lennon, waiting for Paul and Ringo to show up.

Video insanity…

Dave Farquhar Video , , ,

The Pinnacle DV500+ is notoriously hard to install and configure. What they usually don’t tell you is that that’s only the case under Windows 9x. Under 2000, it usually just plugs in and goes.
So, when I installed the DV500+ and connected my old Amiga 1080 monitor to its composite output and it only displayed a thin vertical bar, I ripped my PC apart, started juggling cards, chasing a phantom conflict, to no avail.

Finally, I thought to go back to my stack of old equipment and grabbed a 17-year-old Commodore 1702 composite monitor. I hooked it up to a VCR (the computer was still in fragments) and turned it on. Bingo. I hooked the VCR up to the Amiga 1080 and got a thin vertical bar.

I’d have saved myself a couple of hours of effort if I’d just tried another monitor in the first place. The 1080’s longevity wasn’t very good due to a design flaw. I long ago modified it, and I thought I used it fairly regularly as recently as 1997, but maybe it didn’t survive one of my two moves since then. The 1702, on the other hand, is indestructible. It too was a great monitor for its day and was actually a relabeled JVC. I know I hadn’t used it in 6-7 years.

So now I’ve got some Commodore equipment in my computer setup. It’s kind of nice to see that name sitting on my desk again.

That means I just have to learn about Premiere and Pinnacle’s bundled toolkit and continue to develop my eye. I’ve always been just an above-average designer–in j-school I was known for giving you work that was 75% as good as someone who really knew their stuff, but I’d have it done in 1/3 to 1/2 the time–but this time it’s not like I have much competition. I’m competing against mindless, brain-numbing lowest-common-denominator TV.

I ran across this quote today from Bono, U2’s lead singer, about TV: “You just have to not fear the flaws. The flaws are what make it interesting.”

Well, that’s very true about people, and to a certain extent that’s true about machines as well. After all, aren’t the flaws what gave the Ford Edsel its appeal? But I guess I just have such a longstanding bad taste in my mouth about TV that I’m not willing to give it the same benefit of the doubt. I’ll put images to music and put them up on the screen because it’s the language people understand. But it’s still the boob tube.

Time to go see some old friends, and some not-so-old ones.

But that’s just my opinion.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

Free PR advice. I see the Taliban hunted down and assassinated four journalists. Well, OK, it’s not proven that they did it, but it looks like that’s what happened. Now, I know journalists are pretty low on the slimeball scale. I have a journalism degree from the oldest school of journalism in the world, after all. But terrorists and third-world dictators are such a completely different league of low that even a journalist-turned-lawyer-turned-politican who put himself through college selling used cars wouldn’t begin to approach it.
Bad move, guys. There’s anti-war sentiment brewing in Europe, but killing four unarmed civilians will do very little to fuel that. Reminding the people that the enemy they face is irrational and unrelentless and unmerciful isn’t a good way to end wars. You lose points in the court of public opinion, and it doesn’t put you in a good negotiating position either.

But even beyond all that, you should never kill that which you can manipulate–unless you’ve lost so much belief in your cause that you’re no longer confident of being able to put the right spin on things to convince anyone else that you’re right.

So we have further evidence that our enemy is mind-numbingly stupid. We have indication that their belief in themselves, or at least in their ability to escape from this alive, is wavering–instead of feeding information to journalists they’ve resorted to suppressing information by killing them. And we have indication of growing desperation. See above.

This is no time for protesting. This is exactly the time to start squeezing harder. Much harder.

I want to believe this. I mean I really, really want to believe…

Incidentally, if Gator isn’t uninstalling for you, Ad-Aware seems to do a nice job of eradicating it.

New toys. My 10,000 RPM Quantum/Maxtor Atlas 10K3 arrived yesterday. It takes the drive a while to initialize (upwards of 30 seconds) but once it gets rolling, it’s incredible. A completely unacceptable 37 seconds passes between the time Windows 2000’s “Starting Windows” screen appears and the time the login prompt appears. The thing’s amazing. Just to be obnoxious, I defragmented the drive while other things were running. They didn’t interfere with each other much–that’s the magic of SCSI command reordering.

I installed MS Office 2000 just to see how that would run. Word launches from a dead stop in three seconds. Kill the Office Assistant and it loads in less than two.

I know SCSI drives don’t benchmark much faster than high-end IDE drives, but the difference I see between a high-end SCSI drive like this one and a fast IDE drive is significant. Everything that ever has to touch the disk runs faster. This includes Web browsers pulling data out of the local cache.

Users who don’t do much multitasking probably won’t see much difference, but for a multitasking freak like me–I’ve only got 8 windows open on this machine as I type this, and I’m wondering what’s wrong with me–it’s unbelievable. I haven’t been this overwhelmed since my days playing with an Amiga (which, come to think of it, had a SCSI drive in it).

Witness the birth of a SCSI bigot.

Oh yeah. I have a Web site.

Dave Farquhar General , , , , ,

You ask me how I am
And all I can say is I still exist…
–lyrical snippet I wrote in 1997
Yep, I’m hacked off and moody, and when I get this way, it’s best if I say little more than yeah, I still exist. I know I won’t regret saying or writing that.

BBQ. I know I cut way back on my red meat intake–I may have managed to eat none at all in October, I’m not sure–but I have this fantasy of moving back to Kansas City, buying a house next door to Gates BBQ–no relation to that scumbag Billy Gates in Seattle–setting up an expense account, and eating BBQ three meals a day. BBQ for breakfast? Don’t dis it until you’ve tried it. But make sure it’s real BBQ. Here in St. Louis, restaurants tend to do Memphis-style BBQ, which is where you cook the meat without sauce until it’s good and dried out, then you splash some spicy sauce on it and call it BBQ. Kansas Citians know real BBQ is cooked long, slow, and in sauce. It adds a little flavor and keeps the meat from drying out as much.

Gates three times a day. Sounds like a great solution to any problem. Or at least a nice distraction.

Music. I’ve been listening to a CD my sister sent me by a band called claas-p.jambor. I know nothing about them, because their Web site xeptional.com is a Flash site and I’ve removed that blight from all my PCs, permanently. (Now if I can just get them to quit prompting me for the plugin…) Well, I do know this: Their music is awesome. Ever listen to a CD, then come to a song that makes you just stop the disc and put that song on repeat play for a couple of hours? “Open Skies” is one of those songs. I know I’m not the only one like that: when Beavis and Butthead saw a video they really liked, they said MTV should just play that video over and over. Beavis and Butthead wouldn’t like claas-p.jambor though. Too punky, and they’re Christian.

But three-chord Christian punk seems to be just what I’ve been looking for.

Blogging. Dan Bowman sent me a link to a site that looks promising. If you like it when I go off on my non-computer tangents, you’ll probably find him interesting. If you wonder what it’s like to be a Catholic priest, or a former Catholic priest, you’ll probably like it. He’s only been at it for a week or so. I like him. He shoots straight, makes me think, and holds just enough back to keep an aura about him. I think he’s more enigmatic than I am.

Effective e-mail communication. I guess I have to do a little computer stuff, huh? Here’s a snippet from a piece of e-mail I sent this morning, to someone who’s about to attend a seminar on effective communications:

“Dave’s rule #1: Make sure what you’re trying to communicate will actually be delivered. Therefore, you should avoid Outlook at all costs.”

To which he responded, Outlook is effective for sending mail bombs, viruses, Powerpoint presentations and Flash animations. I’m sure it transmits Anthrax just fine too. But I’ve had three, maybe even four people have Outlook just flat die in the past week. The answer is sometimes to run nfclean.exe and scanpst.exe. Sometimes I have to delete the user’s NT profile and import their PST. Sometimes I have to completely reinstall.

I hate Outlook. I hate Windows. And I can’t have another Amiga.

Give me Unix or give me death.

Anything for a distraction…

Dave Farquhar General ,

Politics. A local political activist sent me an editorial slamming the Sierra Club for backing down on its anti-Bush campaign during the war. The Sierra Club is arguing that being perceived as anti-patriotic/anti-American hurts its cause more in the long run than suspending for a while. The author takes them to task for not standing by their principles; I think it’s a wise move. They can sling all the mud they want after the fact without harming their reputation, and they’ll accomplish at least as much, if not more.
I often disagree with liberals, but I don’t think they’re idiots. On the other hand, I usually agree with conservative ideas, but I grow tired of seeing conservatives shoot themselves in the foot constantly.

Changes. My Linux box has been my main workstation for about three days now. Konqueror is a more than competent Web browser with some really nice features; KWord turns out to be an awfully nice word processor; it doesn’t do everything Word does but it stays out of my way, and it provides just about all of the functionality that Final Copy, my preferred Amiga word processor, gave me. And KWord’s desktop publishing capabilities put Word to shame. I suspect it’s close to being the equal of Publisher for light DTP work. I wish it had a word count feature and a means of handling footnotes and/or endnotes, but those aren’t features I use constantly. (I can always save the document as plain text and then run it through the standard Unix utility wc; which probably means word count would be frighteningly easy for someone who knew what he was doing to just flat-out implement–output the file in plain-text to a temporary file, pump it through wc, then pop up the output in a dialog box–but C++ scares me.

For mail, I’ve been using Sylpheed, a fast and lightweight client. It’s not feature filled, but it does what I need a mail client to do, and, again, it stays out of my way.

Overheard. “Women are always right, which makes for an interesting problem when two women disagree. So we each just walked away and didn’t say anything.”

I laughed.

“You do know the woman is always right, don’t you?”

“I learned that the hard way. Several years ago.”

(Later in the conversation. Much later.)

“Maybe I’m not quite as brilliant as I think I am.”

“That’s okay, you can keep on thinking you’re brilliant if you want.”

“I can? Cool! Can I have that in writing, so I can take it to work and frame it and hang it in my cubicle?”

“Only if you remember that the woman is always right.”

I expect her to have that sheet of paper written out the next time I see her. And you better believe I’ll be hanging that up if I get it.

When will this virus crap end?

Dave Farquhar Viruses ,

Who in his or her right mind believes the customer is always right? Not I. I’ve seen too many customers who hadn’t a clue about what they wanted, or worse, who deliberately fibbed when the nice survey taker with the clipboard asked them what they’d like: “Mrs. Ferguson, would you like your next car better if it had a heated cup holder?”
The Mrs. (and Mr.) Fergusons of our great land always want a better cup holder, gearshift, trunk, rearview mirror, hood ornament–whatever it might be. We didn’t get to be a consumer society by not consuming everything we could lay our hands on, and in ever bigger, ever better shapes and sizes.

— Robert A. Lutz, Guts

And that, my friends, is why you can’t get anything done with your computers anymore because they’re virus breeding grounds. Microsoft or Adobe come along and ask if you’d like some useless feature, like being able to script inside Outlook or Acrobat, and of course the clueless embeciles say, sure! I might need that feature someday! More likely, that feature will be used against you someday. But we just don’t know how to say no. We gotta have the newest, the slickest, the most feature-filled. Never mind we never touch 90% of the feature bloat, and we complain that it’s too complicated, and the only people who ever use most of the capabilities on the machines on our desks are the virus writers.

BeOS sure has a lot of appeal to me right now–a no-frills OS that’s just an OS, nothing more, nothing less, with simple apps that just get the job done. And all at blazing speed. So the company’s about to go under. BFD. I stuck with my Amiga through Commodore’s troubles, and even for a couple of years after the company evaporated. If the machine works, I don’t really care who else is running the same stuff I’m running. What about support? It’s not like Microsoft fixes its bugs either, so if I’m gonna run an OS that isn’t going to be fixed, it might as well be one that started off good in the first place.

Monday, 2 July 2001

Dave Farquhar General , , , ,

Some lucky people get a five-day weekend this week. Not me. I’m off Wednesday for Independence Day. About 30 years ago, my dad and his med school buddies used to go to the Missouri River and shoot bottle rockets at barges to celebrate. I’m not sure what I’ll get to do yet. Last year I had to work the 4th. That was a very nice paycheck, since I worked 60 hours that week anyway, on top of 8 hours’ holiday pay.
I found a use for absurdly high-speed CPUs this weekend. My Duron-750 can simulate a 30-team, 162-game baseball season in its entirety in roughly 3 minutes. Of course a faster CPU will do it even faster. Baseball simulation is very CPU-intensive and very disk-intensive. This 750 has a SCSI disk subsystem in it too. It’s old, but I suspect SCSI’s ability to re-order disk requests for speed helps. I haven’t swapped in an IDE drive to see if it makes a difference. So if you’re a statistical baseball junkie, you can actually justify an insanely fast CPU. It feels strange to call the cheapest CPU on the market today insanely fast, but for most things, the Duron-750 really is.

The other use I’ve found for these CPUs is emulating a 50 MHz 68060-based Amiga at full speed. A Duron-750 isn’t quite up to that task.

I talked about PartImage last week. I used it over the weekend to clone 7 PCs. My church’s sister congregation bought 8 Compaq Deskpro EXs earlier this year and just finished the room they’re going in. So I went in, set one of them up (and tweaked it out, of course–the first reaction of one of the members: “Wow, that sure boots fast!”).

Sadly, many companies seem to use non-profit organizations as a way to just get rid of their junk. Here are some of the jewels this church has been “blessed” with: two 386sx laptops with dead batteries and no power adapters, two XTs, two 286s, a pile of 386sxs, and three 486s. Two of the 486s are old Compaq ProSignia servers with big SCSI hard drives, so I can slap in an ISA NIC and install Linux on one of them and make it a file server. The only thing remotely useful that anyone’s ever given them is a pair of Pentium-75s. But one of the 75s had a 40-meg hard drive in it. That’s the better of the two, though. The other had no hard drive, no memory, and no CMOS battery.

Oh, and I shouldn’t forget the large quantities of busted monitors. They’ve got a room full of monitors. About three of them work. What’s anyone going to do with a bunch of monitors that don’t work? Legally, the church can’t throw any of this stuff away (and shouldn’t) because of all the lead content, which makes them hazardous waste. But the church can hardly afford to pay someone to take it away and dispose of it properly either. We’re talking an inner-city church here. Can you say, “blaxploitation?” I knew you could.

The Pentiums did at least come in standard AT cases though, and nice ones at that. They look like Enlights, but they had Sparkle power supplies in them, Whatever the make, they’re nice and thick so they don’t slice you, there’s lots of wide open space inside, and they have 7 drive bays. So I grabbed the diskless Pentium to make into a router/Squid server/content filter. I ripped out the P75 board and dropped in an AT Soyo Socket 370 board with a Celeron-366 on it. It’ll be fabulous.

The best I can do with most of these systems is to try to make X terminals out of them, assuming I can find a machine beefy enough to host StarOffice for a half-dozen systems. It may not be worth the bother.

One of the 386s had a 420-meg hard drive in it for some reason, so I pulled that drive, hooked it up to the first of the Compaqs, and used PartImage to dump it. I used 480 megs on the drive, so with Gzip compression, the image left just 12 megs free on the drive. Tight fit, but we were OK. Then I just ran around to each of the others, hooked up the drive, and pulled the image. I took the drive home with me so I could burn a CD from it.

That’s good use of free software.